Day 50 - Just Say No

 JUST SAY NO

Prompt - Just Say No :  Write about the power you felt when you told someone no.

I wasn't very good at saying no.  I'm still not.  I'm wasn't always good at saying yes either.  Indecision was too easy.  But that can't carry on when your task is delivery of a project that must be completed on time.  No matter what it took.  This was a so-called Millennium Bug project, and the first of January 2000 would be unforgiving.  So one of the most significant decisions I had to make has stuck in my mind and still comes back to me, more than two decades later.  

Our pilot sites were up and running, and faults were being logged at a worrying rate.  The new version, for the first wave of the rollout proper, still had known faults, although it was far better than anything the pilots had.  The start of the rollout proper approached, was less than a week away and I had to decide to send out my installation teams, or delay the first wave.  (This was pre internet-rollout days, I was having to send two teams of seven people out on the road for four plus months, to over six hundred sites, using floppy discs as the installation medium.)   The timetable was long and complicated.  yes, there was plenty of contingency built in, but I knew, from what we'd already experienced with our eleven pilot sites, that there would be delays, problems to overcome, more unforeseen events blocking the path.  

My two team leaders, deputies, senior advisers, whatever you want to call them, wanted delay.  They knew how bad the application still was, knew that there would be another, better version coming in a couple of weeks.  Or however long the testers took to approve it.  They didn't want the pressure of knowing that there was a version out there that wasn't showing us in a good light, and advised that I'd have to find resource, later in the year perhaps, to go to these sites again and install upgrades.  

A simple enough choice.  I could go to my project board and explain why I was calling a delay in the timetable, contact all the local authorities who were geared up to receive our guys , then rejig the timetable to accommodate the changes.  That would absorb some of my contingency, remove a bit of the flexibility I'd built in.  It would make us look bad in the eyes of our customers.  Not a problem in itself, but the associated loss of confidence would reduce the goodwill I knew I needed to succeed.  And my problem would be how long to call the delay for.  two weeks?  Three?  What if the testing didn't complete by then?  Another delay?

Or I could say I had listened to their advice, but remind them that this had to be my responsibility.  I would let the board know that I was proceeding against the advice of my team, so that if it all backfired I'd be the one to carry the can.  

So I said no.  That was my job.  I won't pretend I felt confident, that I was sure that I'd done the right thing, that there weren't a lot of doubts.  I worried, I questioned my own ability.  I went over the options and the arguments over and over again, even after I'd made the decision.  But I made it.  And time proved it was the right choice.  My deputy were generous enough to admit it, months later (deputy singular by then, as the other had succumbed to a serious illness and died during the project).  

Sometimes I got it right.